OR “SOUND IN JEDI KNIGHT: DARK FORCES II”
By Porter Simmons

I saw Star Wars for the first time when I was three. My parents, who were going out for the night for this or that, dropped me off at my grandparents’ house so my uncle could watch me while they were away. Shortly after they slipped out the door my uncle opened a cabinet in the living room to reveal a large, boxy, and—at the time—revolutionary Sony flat screen TV and excitedly shoved A New Hope into the VCR. Soldiers, spaceships, and laser beams raced across the screen, illuminating the dim room with bursts of static color as Mark, my uncle, translated the sights and sounds into a simplified voiceover. “That is Darth Vader,” he said with an animated pause as a dark figure emerged from a cloud of white smoke. With each menacing, mechanical breath I sank further into my seat, falling deeper and deeper into the world. “Are you scared?” Mark asked. I glanced at him from across the room and shook my head. “Good,” he smiled. “Don’t be scared.”

Two years later, after watching Star Wars had become a daily ritual, I was over at my grandparents’ house for dinner. While my grandma was getting ready to serve dessert, Mark leaned over to me and whispered, “Hey. I’ve got something to show you.” I followed him quietly downstairs, unsure of what to expect. We walked into his room and he pulled a second chair next to his PC, gesturing for me to sit down. As he fiddled with the disc drive and start menu I looked around the room, noting the muted geese print wallpaper and the smell of musky cologne. It always felt safe and entirely separate from other known places. “Okay,” he said eagerly. “It’s ready.” I looked at the computer screen. Even with rudimentary reading skills, the words “JEDI KNIGHT” etched in virtual stone were unmistakable. Mark selected “New Game” and the speakers confirmed our entrance into the world with a familiar click.

For someone whose experience with video games had been limited to a narrow assortment of 90s educational hallmarks—Math Blaster, Jump Start, Reader Rabbit—Star Wars Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II was head-to-toe exhilarating. In sharp contrast to something like Math Blaster where your character was confined to the four walls of the screen, Dark Forces II appeared endless, a journey into the screen where those four walls formed a window into another world entirely. And that world was a familiar one: from the first gunfight in some godforsaken cantina, it was clear that this was consummate, true to form Star Wars.

…

David Levison is from California—a “California boy” as he refers to himself. Growing up in the shadow of the Hollywood sign in sun-soaked Los Angeles, Dave told me his three biggest childhood influences were “video games, Star Wars, and music.” “In a way, it seems like my destiny was to work on sound and music for Star Wars games,” he said.

Initially, his dream was to “be in a band and make records and tour the world.” After picking up guitar in middle school he played in several bands through college, starting at house parties before making it to the club scene and eventually concert venues in L.A., all while finishing up a degree in music composition from CalArts. He also toyed with the idea of writing music for the big screen, “so I got a job working for a film composer and keyboardist, while still playing in bands and collaborating on music with friends.”

After CalArts, “some friends and musical collaborators were moving to San Francisco, so I decided to visit because I’d never been there.” Dave quickly fell in love with the Bay Area and its art culture, which was thriving in the 90s—the same scene that produced the punk rock sound of Green Day and Third Eye Blind, and MC Hammer’s chart-topper “U Can’t Touch This.” “I decided I needed a change of scene,” he said. “It was mainly a lifestyle change, because if I really thought about my career aspirations of getting into film music, it would have been better to stay in L.A.”

After a few years in San Francisco running a small production studio, he heard about opportunities to work in sound for technology and game developers. “This really intrigued me,” he said. After a brief stint at a small PS1 developer that failed to release any titles, Dave took a contract position with ill-fated Rocket Science Games, which was staffed with both game and film people. “There was a lot of hype around the convergence of Hollywood and games at that time,” he said. Shortly before Rocket Science went out of business in spectacular fashion, having raised $35 million and once graced the cover of Wired magazine, Dave took a full-time position as a sound designer at LucasArts, the developer behind Grim Fandango, Full Throttle, and the Star Wars games. His first project was Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II.

…

“That was so long ago,” was how Dave initially responded when I first asked if I could interview him about his work on Dark Forces II. He’s lived in the Bay Area for more than 25 years now, and after doing sound design for 42 titles and touring the world with his band, ZONK, he recently settled into a full-time position on the Sound + Design team at Facebook. “It was time for another change,” he said.

For something that was released in 1997, Dave remembers a lot of specifics about the sound of Dark Forces II. “That’s the sound for jumping off a metal surface,” he told me when I played a sound effect from one of the game’s first levels. “It’s from foley recordings of boots on metal as well as recordings of clothing movement with equipment on.” When I played him one of the sounds for force speed, he explained that this was just the activation sound: “There was also a looping sound that played during the time this power was active.” When I played him the sound of failure—Kyle, the playable character, hitting the ground after a long fall—he tells me how he used the sound of breaking bones to make it sound more painful: “Chicken bones, I believe.” “I think one of the things that helps to make Dark Forces II more immersive than previous games is the level of detail we went with for sound,” Dave said. “I’m pretty sure previous games did not put in that level of detail; for example, putting in the sound of clothing movement.”

There were three people on the sound team for Dark Forces II: Dave, who designed all in-game sound effects; Larry the O, who handled cutscene audio; and Peter McConnell, who edited John Williams’ score for the game. In the 90s, this represented a significant investment in sound: Doom (1993) and Quake (1996), the biggest first-person shooters pre-Dark Forces II, both had sound teams of one; even Half-Life, released a year after Dark Forces II, only had one on staff. While the game featured some identifiable objects like lightsabers and stormtroopers, LucasArts ultimately leaned on sound instead of visuals to establish the Star Wars universe.

“I wanted it to sound like Star Wars, but I also wanted it to sound like a game,” Dave explained. “Things like pickups and power-ups are things that don’t exist in the films and are an opportunity to do more game-like design. Ideally you want these sounds to be really satisfying. For some of these I used some source material from the films, but most of them required new sound design. In the movies you don’t spend much time in any one location, whereas in a game, you could spend a lot of time in one place trying to solve a puzzle or get past enemies, so I think that warranted making the environments rich with sound.” Examples of this more game-like design include the health pack and thermal detonator pickups. “I tried to make each pickup sound unique and identifiable,” he said.

Among other things, Dark Forces II is most famous among fans for being the game that introduced the lightsaber as a playable weapon. “It was definitely challenging to make the sounds of the lightsaber work in a game setting because it’s such a dynamic weapon,” Dave said, “But I think we did okay with the resources we had at the time.” While most weapons in the game only had two or three sounds, Dave created 22 different audio files for the lightsaber, including turn on, turn off, 9 swinging sounds, 10 impact sounds, and one loop for when the lightsaber was active.

“When you’re making a game, you’re just trying to make the best possible thing to satisfy your standards as well as try to anticipate what the fans would enjoy,” Dave said. “With Star Wars, there’s an additional layer of trying to be true to the universe of the films, try to capture some of that magic, and make the player feel like they are part of that universe.” He further explained:

Wherever possible with the technology we had at the time, the attempt was to make it sound as close to the films as possible. I had the advantage of access to the sound library generated by Ben Burtt and crew for the films, so some of the task was adapting those sounds for the game, but I also had to create sounds for all the force powers, which didn’t exist. Even for things that did exist in the films, we didn’t always have the source for them so we had to reverse engineer them and create a new source. There were of course lots of things in Dark Forces II that didn’t exist in the films, so that was all original sound design.

Sound was how I recognized even as a five-year-old that the game provided an authentic Star Wars experience. The opening of Dark Forces II—one of my favorite moments in the game—is set in a seedy bar on a distant planet. A deal with some thugs has just gone bad, and when you first take control of Kyle Katarn—the playable character who’s a bit more Clint Eastwood than Han Solo—the first thing he does is pull out his blaster. While cantina music plays in the background, you engage in a shootout with some three-eyed henchmen. “Get out of my bar,” says the guy behind the counter, after a few bodies litter the floor. “You always cause trouble.” It’s such a quintessential Star Wars moment, and the game is so filled with these that it’s never hard to orient yourself in the mythology. 23 years later, Dark Forces II still makes me feel like a rebel.

This article is DEEP-HELL.COM Freelance Writing. We’d like to support artists we find interesting, all funds come from our Patreon subscribers.
Porter Simmons is a writer and e-commerce director from Salt Lake City. You can find him on Twitter or his website.T